I’m pretty sure it’s going to go like this imo:
But really, I’m just hoping that’s what they do. Hey, IMC, communicate your plan with us.
Excellent post. IMC is managing to destroy a wonderful game.
I feel completely harmed, because we pay to play for a disguised beta release.
The South American server being a total disaster. I regret to have migrated to Silute because since there was a migration I can’t play 5 minutes: bug channel or absurd lag .
Now they sell a pack out of reality in order to use simple game functions.
Nostalgia for nostalgia, I will return to play WoW, as Blizzard is giving copies of the game for those who are attending Warcraft.
When TOS is released in fact, maybe I have a second chance.
i hope imc solve this issue faster
It’s typical PR/marketing to only allude to something being wrong instead of outright admitting the flaw.
Thank you for taking the time to respond to my post. I appreciate the personal attention, although I wish it didn’t have to come to this in order to have community issues addressed.
I don’t know if you’re still following this thread or not, but if you are, or if other staff are following it on your and IMC’s behalf, please consider posting this reply as a Steam announcement, or in the general announcement forums on the front page, and in centralized locations for the game so that the community as a whole can see that, at the very least, IMC is seeing and hearing the concerns. This information is relevant to every Tree of Savior player, not just those who happen to come across my thread.
For a good long while, you (when I say you, I mean IMC as a whole, not just you personally) gave an impression that you were not tuned into the community. Perhaps its a language barrier or a lack of experience in interfacing with western markets, which would be perfectly understandable. If this is the case, and if IMC takes nothing else from this post, please understand this above all else: communication is extremely vital!
Update your dev blogs, talk about future plans, show faith and respect for us by speaking to us as people and explaining the truth about problems instead of simply assuming we are wallets or numbers who don’t want or won’t understand the details, encourage your new community managers to talk to us in threads like Julie did, give us a behind the scenes once in a while, show us that IMC loves this game as much as we do, because this is where the disconnect and miscommunication comes in.
When you do not tell us what is going on, it is our nature to assume that things are bad, or that you do not have anything good to tell us. In 2016, with so many games for people to choose from, it doesn’t take much for people to move on and look for something else. By the same token, however, because there are so many options and the industry has become vague and impersonal, there is an enormous opportunity for IMC to build customer loyalty by standing out from the pack. You already have an amazing product that is a bit rough around the edges, and the only thing left for you to do is polish it and make it great.
Stand out as a company, and deliver a solid, fun and immersive product and the money will come. The businesses that I deal with are those who treat me like a person, and not a wallet or a metric. Most other people feel the same, but may not be able to express it in the best or most productive way.
While I do not agree with some of your design decisions, including your steadfast defense of the RMT/trading restrictions and the price of your DLC, I respect that you took the time to view this thread and address the concerns raised in it. I am especially thankful for the clarification regarding Julie and the transparency with your situation between you and the SA server provider and DDoS (although I am from the US, I’m sure they appreciate knowing that things don’t seem to be entirely your fault).
I sincerely hope that you will see this reply as well, and take into consideration some of my words, even if they come from only one customer among thousands.
As for me, for what it’s worth, I will pop my other 60 day token and stick around for another couple months to see if things improve. I still love the game, and even though there is much in your reply that I personally disagree with, I respect the time and the effort you took in making it, as well as the insight into some of what is going on. I also appreciate the decision to close the game off until you resolve the stability issues. I think that is a step in the right direction.
Please continue to speak with the community and show enthusiasm and progress, and we will continue to play the game we love 
Reading this response gives me so much hope.
This game has so much potential to be what Ragnarok would have ever dreamed of becoming.
This game is obviously like a child to you guys and that’s one reason why I hate to see the poor design choices made to prevent bots from playing. I know and understand they were all made thinking about the game’s health. Unfortunately they also hurt player experience health without really stopping bots from being here.
Anyways. I’m glad to see that OP’s word have reached Hakkyu Kim. After a long time without a Staff post, I was beginning to lose hope and even began to think that spamming the forums is a good idea, since we had no success with single threads so far.
Congrats for IMC for finally taking a step back and looking at the game’s big picture at such an early stage of release. I’ve worked within the game publishing industry enough to know that this is no easy task to accomplish. A lot of corporate bullshit must have tried to stop this from happening for sure.
I am now playing this game with the satisfaction to see it succeed rather than waiting for it’s inevitable demise.
Best of luck to you guys and I wish Odin to give you the strength and better judgment for your team to make the best decisions so you can deliver the game I’m sure you guys wanted us to have (And something went terribly wrong for some reason).
Woooohoooo!!
Two days ago a new player, only level 37 asked me if he should buy gold. He said goldbuyers arent punished, only RMT and bots.
Want as I might, I could not definatively tell him not to, because he was right.
The top journal player being a Goldbuyer doesnt exactly help justify the trade/market restrictions, if Goldbuyers are not being punished at all.
Or having them validated by Steam a month earlier, so it would be ready for the F2P release.
I’m surely not the only one that finds it amusing to see a number of worms squirming in reply to hkkim’s post.
I mean… Just because a serial killer is not brought to justice doesn’t mean you have no reason to not tell someone that wants to become a serial killer that it’s wrong to do so. lol
The more people buying from them, the more incentive they have to keep ruining legit player’s gameplay experience.
I do understand what you mean. It’s frustrating.
Completely agree, bought every DLC pack… got level 280 and stopped playing for over 2 weeks now. I refuse to play this game again until they remove all this ridiculous trading restrictions and actually improve the game instead of making it worse with every update.
Game has so much potential and it’s very depressing to see it fail so hard.
It’s nice to see some response but honestly this isn’t that comforting…
The fact that IMC didn’t even have an actual workable plan for monetizing is kinda scary. Nobody on their team spent 5 minutes in Steam’s documentation to find out you can’t buy the same DLC multiple times, or that the number of DLCs you can add to a product are limited? Seriously?
I mean, that’s pretty huge and should be incredibly embarrassing. I’m kinda surprised they even admitted that specifically - they’re either super transparent or that much of novices at this. They just told us flat out they didn’t bother to make sure one of the most basic and important parts of their game, Tp availability and revenue generation, was possible how they had planned in steam and not have to completely use another system/approach. Ouch.
What else have they not researched? Can the game even be fixed in its current state or are they going to realize something else similar down the line?
Thank you so much for your wonderful and thoughtful reply! I can not express how much this has changed my perception of the game and your company. That you would take the time out to reply to us means a lot. I love ToS so much, it’s the first mmo i’ve really gotten into for a long time. Your message has renewed my hope for this game and has made me feel safer about were it’s going.
I know you have a small staff and you guys work very hard and have to pick and choose what’s feasible to reply to but a little message of any kind goes a long way in restoring faith. I know you guys probably have to put up with a lot of harsh words yourselves and i know that can be difficult, however i think it’s a good sign people get over emotional about your game; because it shows how much we all really love it and want to see it live a long, succesful life. Please try and remember that in some ways, us players are a part of the team too!
Anyway i know it’s unlikely you’ll be able to respond but thank you. Please keep the communication up! It gives us the hope we need to persevere and make the game great together. Good luck and keep up the hard work, let’s make ToS great together! 
Beyond expectations indeed. It’s good that this is getting explained since the recent announcement seemed absurd without knowing this background. Well, it’s still absurd, but at least there’s a reason. Not many companies talk about what’s going on behind the scenes, so getting to hear about it makes it more interesting to continue watching this game’s fate unfold.
"First, we would like to explain why we had devised the 3 month Exclusive Access plan.
The main concern we had with the Steam launch was whether we could provide a stable service upon release to a massive international audience.
There are numerous factors that can cause instability, but we anticipate that one of the main causes would be a higher concentration of players than we expected. Many unprecedented problems may affect the servers and creating waiting queues to counter this would merely cause inconvenience for everyone. Furthermore, intrusion of numerous bot accounts would also bring detrimental results to the server and the community.
We thought that the best way to provide a much more pleasant and stable gaming environment would be to estimate the approximate amount of players before the massive international release. This would prepare us to respond ideally as we gradually increase the player base."
? Sounds like they stated their reason right there.
Really? This non-appology actually convinced someone?
TL;DR version:
hkkim: We are not at fault if we planned badly, took bad decisions and whatnot, but we are trying to improve. About the DLCs, if you don’t want it, then it was not made for you, so don’t buy it. About Julie, she left on her own, but our current CM looks like he doesn’t care but we’re confident he is doing a great job.
That didn’t come until AFTER the announcement of the founders pack 3-month plan, which was NOT accompanied by such a description of their reasoning.
The only time IMC ever explains what they’re doing or why they’re doing it is when people call out their BS. This is further supported by the fact that Mr Kim himself felt the need to make an appearance in this very thread.
He answered our prayers. Which I’m actually thankful for even if it’s not the response I’d like to see personally. It took other games like Path of Exile a while to come out of their shell after denying and ignoring most things to come into good standing with the players. Now the developers come onto the podcast and handle things on a personal level too.
to you :3
Thanks for replying. I appreciate the care shown.
@brandoncotten
Comparing children dying to a cult VS issues in a game. You need to rethink them priorities. o~o There is a not-so-fine-line between them two.
I guess you are not that tolerant. The game has been on for only a few months, it has yet a lot to grow. I’m not a white knight, I just know that some things are not that easy to fix.
Sometimes I get upset too, specially with those spamming bots on the cities, but I’m going to wait and play and see what happens.